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Background

As of the 1st of September, I left the TU Delft and started working at the department Industrial Design of the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven. You can reach me at:
Technische Universiteit Eindhoven

Department of Industrial Design
Designing Quality in Interaction
Den Dolech 2
5612 AZ Eindhoven
The Netherlands
room: HG 2.59
tel: +31 (0)40 247 5966
email: mbruns [at] tue.nl
After graduating from high school it was clear that I wanted to build things. Despite the fact that I actually wanted to create edible products, I decided to study industrial design at Delft University of Technology. However, besides design, my other passion remained creating food, and focuses particularly on the Spanish "cocina".I was raised in Holland but with two cultural backgrounds as my father is Dutch and mother Spanish. Wanting to experience Spain other than only on vacation, I went to live for a year in Valencia where I both studied at the UPV and did an internship at the design studio Gallega Diseño. In Valencia, design was very traditional and centered mainly on graphic and furniture design but soon I realized it was all too static for me.

Back in Delft I started my graduation project and discovered the world of tangible interaction, where the digital meets the physical. Physical objects come to life through digital technology, and digital information is made tangible to facilitate access. With the fast growing market of mp3 music and inspired by the iPod (2003), I thought people would want easy access to the large collections of music stored on their computer hard drive, without using "another" remote. Therefore I developed Music Cube, a physical interpretation of digital music collections that comes to life by responding to users with sounds and by changing its appearance. By manipulating it music can be controlled without having direct access to a computer. Colored lights and sounds provide feedback on the actions and type of music that is reproduced.

The manipulations that have to be made to control the Music Cube included shaking, rotating, and squeezing. By shaking the cube for example a randomly selected song would be reproduced. I started to wonder whether the intensity by which it was shaken would tell something on the type of content that had to be selected. Although my initial dream was to open a Spanish restaurant, I got the great opportunity to continue exploring this question through my PhD project on Affective Tangible Interaction.